THIS Article, derived mainly from the Augsburg Confession through the Thirteen Articles, is carefully framed to preserve the truth against heresies concerning the Nature and Person of Christ.  Many of those heresies originated in the early centuries of the Church’s life, and are often called after their originators,^[1] but they are sometimes repeated in modern times.

The Article may be considered under four main assertions:

(1) Christ is the eternal Son of God ‘begotten from everlasting. . . of one substance with the Father.  This declaration is directed against Arianism and all who, like Arius, say there was a time when the Son did not exist.^[2]  Whereas Article I is concerned with the distinctions in the Godhead, and of the relation of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father, this Article treats primarily of the Son’s relation to the world.  The most general way in which Christians think of Christ is that He is the Mediator, the Agent in God’s contact with the world: God acts through Him in creating^[3] and giving cohesion to the universe, and He brings salvation.  Now the intellectual atmosphere of early Christianity was full of ideas of intermed­iary powers and principles,^[4] and by far the most widespread and important of these was Logos, the Greek term for ‘Word’ or ‘expressed reason’.  In view of what the Church believed about Christ, no more fitting name could have been applied to Him.  He was the Mediator par excellence; all that had been ascribed to the old intermediaries, and more, was found in Him.  Later Christian thinkers made great use of the Logos idea in discussing the significance of Christ, but it does not occur in the New Testament outside the Johannine writings.  No canonical writer alludes so frequently to Christ’s mediatorial function as St. Paul, and yet he never once refers to Him as ‘the Word’.  The Apostle distrusted the wisdom of the world and avoided its terminology; the Christ of the inner life is the dominant factor for him.  In the classical New Testament passage for the designation of Christ as the Word, St. John 1:1-14, the central thought of the Article is plainly stated, ‘the Word’ or only-begotten Son ‘became flesh, and dwelt among us’.  The intermediaries of contemporary philosophy were abstractions, and through the Christian use of it the venerable term ‘Logos’ was personalized and enriched by its identification with the Son.

At the human level the relation between father and son is expressed by ‘begotten’; the father ‘begets’ his son; and since the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are employed to denote the First and Second Persons in the Trinity, it is inevitable that we should conceive of the relationship between them in this way.  But the human analogy is utterly inadequate to indicate the relations in the Godhead.  We are in the realm of mystery when discussing this subject, and the inadequacy of human language to describe conditions in ultimate Reality is to be expected.  The religious attitude of awe and wonder is appro­priate here, not the quest for rational comprehension.